Q. What is Certified Wood?
A. Certified wood comes from forests that are environmentally managed to a standard set by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Certified wood are held to the same grading standards as non-certified wood, but the big difference is that certified woo promotes sustainable forest management.

Q. Who needs to be FSC Chain of Custody Certified?
A. According to FSC, any company making, changing, trading, re-labeling or repackaging FSC Certified products needs to be COC certified in order to use the FSC trademarks and to enable its customers to make an FSC claim about these products.

Q. What is LEED?
A. LEED is an acronym which stands for "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design", a High Performance Green Building program developed by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improving indoor enviroinmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensetivity to their impacts.

Q. How are LEED credits structured?
A. There are five sections where a project can earn LEED credits:
-Site Selection
-Water Efficienct
-Energy&Atmosphere
-Material&Resources***
-Indoor Environmental Quality***
-***These two sections pertain to products offered by Atlantic Plywood

Q. How are LEED credits assessed per project?
A. Credits for LEED projects are reviewed once during the design phase and then at the end of the construction phase. A member of the project team (owner, architecture firm, general contractor, green building consultant) pulls the M&R credits and supporting documents together and submits them to USGBC for review. USGBC has several LEED credit review contractors that they use to review the credits and supporting documents. After 30 days, USGBC sends the report back to the project team with 'pending' or 'denied' credits. The project team then has 30 days to comply with the report that will be submitted to USGBC for a second review. Once this second review is complete the project is awarded its certification.